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Everyone neglected the work of the moment in that hour of putting to sea, and Mac, perched high on the roof of the wireless cabin, watched it with as much pride and rapture as might an emperor reviewing the grandest of fleets. In single line-ahead, the fourteen great grey ships, their smoke trailing away over the port quarter before a fresh wind, passed down the wild rocky gap of the entrance.
There was nothing for it but to work out of Plymouth Sound in the teeth of the wind. In the night, the English passed out to sea, across the Spanish front, and so in the morning found themselves to windward and attacked as it would seem, for the first time in naval warfare, in "line-ahead" formation, pouring successive broadsides into the enemy's "weathermost" ship.
Farragut's flagship, the Hartford, leading the line-ahead, suffered least from the dense smoke on that damp, calm, moonless night. But the others were soon groping blindly up the tortuous channel. The Hartford herself took the ground for a critical moment. But, with her own screw going ahead and that of the Albatross going astern, she drew clear and won through.
Far-off, the little Spanish guns did correspondingly small damage, even when they managed to hit; while the heavy metal of the English, handled by real seamen-gunners, inflicted crushing damage in return. But even more important than the Englishmen's superiority in rig, hull, armament, and expert seamanship was their tactical use of the thoroughly modern line-ahead.
Also, it may be mentioned that by simple alterations of course a line-abreast may be converted into a line-of-bearing and a line-of-bearing into a line-ahead, and that the reverse can be effected by the same operation. Again, adherence to a plan which presupposes the enemy's fleet to be in a particular formation after he is found to be in another is not to be expected of a consummate tactician.
About 6 A.M. the enemy's fleet was sighted from the Victory, and observed to bear from her E. by S. and be distant from her ten or twelve miles. The distance is corroborated by observed bearings from Collingwood's flag-ship. Viewed from the British ships, placed as they were relatively to it, the enemy's fleet must have appeared as a long single line-ahead, perhaps not very exactly formed.
When the two lines converged to close range, the leading British ship shifted her course slightly so as to run parallel with that of the French, and the two fleets sailed past each other firing broadsides. So far the battle had followed traditional line-ahead pattern.
This necessitated an alteration of course to port, so that his ships came into a 'line-of-bearing' so very oblique that it may well have been loosely called a 'line-ahead. Sir Charles Ekins says that the two British lines 'afterwards fell into line-ahead, the ships in the wake of each other, and that this was in obedience to signal. Collingwood's line certainly did not fall into line-ahead.
Nine high-sided battle-ships of ten-gun type nine floating forts, each one, unopposed, able to reduce to smoking ruin a city out of sight of its gunners; each one impregnable to the shell fire of any fortification in the world, and to the impact of the heaviest torpedo yet constructed they came silently along in line-ahead formation, like Indians on a trail.
The plan announced in the celebrated memorandum of 9th October 1805 indicated, for the attack from to windward, that the British fleet, in what would be called on shore an echelon of two main divisions and an 'advance squadron, would move against an enemy assumed to be in single line-ahead.
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